Chair in Econometrics (W3) and Konstanz... any ideas on how good it is there?
Konstanz is awesome, probably the most liveable town in Germany. Lakefront, close to the Alps, as close to the Mediterranean Sea as it gets in Germany.Jackpot!
German Market
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One thing I am puzzled about: Why can no small university achieve scale in one particular subfield? The experience of Bonn seems to suggest that scale in one or very few field is key. Why does no one try to replicate this? Why could Bonn?
Define "small". Bonn is surely not a small department.
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One thing I am puzzled about: Why can no small university achieve scale in one particular subfield? The experience of Bonn seems to suggest that scale in one or very few field is key. Why does no one try to replicate this? Why could Bonn?
Because almost no one cares at the admin level. Admins are basically wanna be politicians and they have almost zero interest in international excellence. They are Laschet types. If you are a regional politician what you want to offer is pretty much every somewhat big field for teaching purposes so that your Landeskinder can stay around. That's it.
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One thing I am puzzled about: Why can no small university achieve scale in one particular subfield? The experience of Bonn seems to suggest that scale in one or very few field is key. Why does no one try to replicate this? Why could Bonn?
Because almost no one cares at the admin level. Admins are basically wanna be politicians and they have almost zero interest in international excellence. They are Laschet types. If you are a regional politician what you want to offer is pretty much every somewhat big field for teaching purposes so that your Landeskinder can stay around. That's it.
This, sadly.
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One thing I am puzzled about: Why can no small university achieve scale in one particular subfield? The experience of Bonn seems to suggest that scale in one or very few field is key. Why does no one try to replicate this? Why could Bonn?
Bonn is indeed not small, their macro and metrics groups are also among the larger ones in Germany... you do see some small departments pull that type of thing off even though it requires quite a bit of coordination (Duesseldorf and maybe Bamberg come to mind, also maybe Bielfeld, Konstanz a few years ago) and maybe it buys them something in the sense that they have somewhat more active researchers than they otherwise would - but it's still not sufficient for playing in the top leagues + the price you pay is that for offering something like an econ program to students this type of specialisation is kind of inconvenient...
with a small budget, the choice of fields where you can try these tricks is limited to those where research is cheap (= anything that's theory). from that perspective, it's kind of surprising that nobody tried to build their department around econometric theory rather than micro theory... if I had to build a German department now, maybe that's what I would try... even though the students might have their own views about having all their courses taught by econometric theorists... or am I overlooking something? (except that traditionally Germany was much better in micro theory than in econometric theory)... Indeed, the production of micro researchers in Germany is so healthy that even not so great places can attract decent people there... not so sure that specialising elsewhere is a great strategy then unless you really mean it...
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I do not understand the "Bonn is big argument". Bonn Macro has (if I counted correctly) 5 Professors and 4 Postdocs. A place like Hohenheim has more Professors than that. I see that you cannot cover four fields with high quality (as Bonn does) at a small school, but one?
The other thing about the costs of specialization: I see that is odd for a graduate students to have no one who can teach you Macro (if you specialized your school on econometric theory, say), but I am not sure if undergrads notice whether someone did research in a field. Put differently: Everyone can teach Varian.
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1) just because a place has 8 professors right now, doesn't mean that they can easily hire 5 new ones according to a particular strategy over the next 5 years... life times are much longer than this...
2) having to teach outside of your own field does make a job less attractive... just imagine you're an experimentalist who is a offered a job where all the teaching is in econometric theory... maybe you can pull it off... but maybe there are other jobs out there where your teaching is easier and more aligned with your own interests... and, sorry, students do notice - you can decide not to care, but it takes an effort. Bamberg may be an example where a concentration in econophysics has been achieved by replacing conventional fields by those people, but: it probably helped that none of the candidates had any illusions about Bonn or Mannheim offering a job in their field.
3) I've been surprised about the unwillingness of, say, microtheorists to teach macro or metrics... you would think that with all those grad programs in place it's a piece of cake... everybody has to learn the basics of everything... but I have my doubts
so: if there's a windfall of three new positions, I can see all the good reasons for making them 3 micro or 3 macro or 3 metrics rather than one of each... but it does feel like an exception
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Bonn has been formed by Hildenbrand. It is as easy as that. Then they took the opportunity that the excellence initiative gave them. Moldovanu and Schweizer smart enough to push this.
Hildenbrand, Selten and Shaked was just a world class team of micro theorists ... if Shaked is your weak link, you have nothing to fear... and then the next version of Moldovanu, Noeldeke and Shaked was still pretty amazing.. and then Noeldeke and Shaked left, and Falk came and we got the Bonn of today and whatever it is... it's still nothing that Darmstadt can easily copy